The culture Hub

I am trying to address the themes of cultural identity, social cohesiveness and sustainable communities.

This theme is a means to improve liveability of cities for the communities that live within developing countries.

I achieved my proposal by introducing a cultural hub which celebrates maritime trade and provides an activity space for all the current identity practice as well as for new and future ones. This could only have been achieved from the 3 week site analysis the Liveable Urbanism Unit took part in. During this time, we engaged in interviews, street conversations, day and night time site analysis and a meeting with the mayor. Although no-one can understand a city in just 3 weeks, we tried our best with photogrammetry, morphology analysis and archive researching. Safe to say, it was a busy 3 weeks.

My conclusions from this project is generally that identity is a complicated matter. That to design for a specific identity is quite an obsolete design decision. What is required is to take a deeper look into the morphology of a city, how road networks lead to nodes which were original settlements. From this, I concluded the city was a city transformed by Trade. Trade was the centre of life before in Ernakulam, and with an intervention within the heart of the market, I believe I did my best to revive and celebrate it.